A Particularly Foul Defence Of Fidel Castro's Economic Record In Cuba

There is almost nothing in this world that people won't defend on one or another political grounds. There really are people out there who think the DPRK is doing a good job, more who argue that Stalin had to break a few eggs, sure, but look at that omelette (and some good guys who keep pointing out that for all the broken eggs there never was an omelette) and sadly all too many who are still shouting that that economic rubble that Fidel Castro made of Cuba isn't in fact what we can see with our own eyes.

What makes this particular one worse for me is that it comes from an academic at the Alma Mater. The London School of Economics always did host a wide diversity of views, as a university should, but there was always something of an attachment to fact rather than propaganda to near the point of casuistry. A valuable trait that seems to be in abeyance currently. For here is an academic at that august institution arguing that actually, Castro's economic outcome wasn't that bad. No, really, what was one of the richer Latin American countries at the time of the revolution, with social indicators well up with and comparable to the Southern Europe of the time, hasn't done badly by having the entire population living on $20 a month today and living in leaky shacks.

Alongside his depiction as a “brutal dictator”, negative reflections on Fidel Castro since his death on November 25 have focused on his “mismanagement” of the Cuban economy and the consequent “extremes of poverty” suffered by ordinary Cubans.

This caricature is problematic – not only because it ignores the devastating economic impact of the United States embargo over 55 years, but also because it is premised on neoclassical economic assumptions. This means that by stressing economic policy over economic restraints, critics can shift responsibility for Cuba’s alleged poverty on to Castro without implicating successive US administrations that have imposed the suffocating embargo.

Not being able to trade with just the one country is not a suffocating embargo. There is still that rest of the world to trade with, as Cuba did and does to the extent that the limitations of a socialist economy enable to it produce anything at all that other people want. The nickel goes to Canada, as it has done for decades, the cigars are available all over this Europe I'm sitting in and so on.

That's the chart that she uses to show that that economic performance hasn't been that bad. And that's just terrible, really, quite foul. Because absolutely no reasonable nor even responsible economist would use GDP to measure development. Is the economic performance of Luxembourg, the manner in which is provides for citizens, greater or lesser than that of China? China's GP is up at what, $9 trillion or something these days? Luxembourg's at $60 billion. By the measure she's using therefore life is better in China than Luxembourg. Which is nonsense, of course. We need the per capita number which is around $6,800 for China, $110,000 for Luxembourg. Sure, GDP, even per capita, isn't everything, but that per capita number gives us a very much better idea of what life is like in the two countries, doesn't it?

At which point, from the same data source she uses, the correct figures we should be using.

And isn't that fascinating? You can see the disastrous fall in Jamaican living standards as Michael Manley took power and tried to impose socialism lite on the country, repeated again on a smaller scale as he returned to power at the end of the 80s. The continued growth from a much lower base of the Dominican Republic using a much more capitalist and free market model (and we really don't think that place was that well governed over this period either). And don't forget that those Cuban numbers are the ones reported by a Communist dictatorship (yes, really, World Bank numbers are based upon what local governments tell them) and even then they don't show any sustained growth until Fidel "retires" and we get a modicum of free markets and thus growth.